The Internet is a phenomenal research tool in that it allows millions of users to access millions of pages of data. Unfortunately, as the number of web sites offering quality information and the quantity of information itself continues to grow, the Internet becomes more difficult to navigate.
The Internet, sometimes simply called the “Net”, is a worldwide system of computer networks. That is, a network of networks in which users at any one computer can, if they have permission, get information from any other computer. Search engines are commonly used to search the web. Users of these search engines can submit their requests in the form of “queries”. Whenever a user submits one of these queries to a search engine, a list of results is generated which includes hyperlinks that connect each search result to the appropriate Internet document.
The way in which these documents are ranked within the list of results (in relation to the query) is constantly evolving as the Internet continues to evolve. Initially, Internet search engines simply examined the number of times that a query search term appeared within the document, wherein the greater the number of times that a search term appeared, the more relevant the document was considered and the higher it was ranked within the list of results. Please realize that this method ranks documents in accordance with their relevance to the topic of the query.
More advanced ranking methods examine the quality of the documents themselves independent of the topic or query. Specifically, the number of links coming into a document and the number of links leaving that document are examined. Those documents that have a considerable number of documents linked to them are considered information authorities and those documents that are linked to a considerable number of documents are considered information hubs. Naturally, the greater the number of these links, the higher the quality (and ranking) of the document. As this method merely ranks the quality of the document and is topic independent, a topic dependant ranking method (such as the one described above) is typically utilized in conjunction with this quality-ranking method.
In an effort to further enhance the relevance of the list of documents generated in response to a query, search engines examine the words of the query entered and compare them to previous queries entered which included the same words. Naturally, this is a topic-dependant relevance ranking method that allows the search engine to further predict (or suggest) what additional search terms the user might want to include in the query.